Lax State Gun Laws Tied to Crimes in Other States

Monday

Sep 27, 2010 at 5:17 AM

City leaders are pointing a finger at the states where many of the weapons are sold.

ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON — Nearly 600 mayors nationwide, led by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and other city leaders, are mounting a new campaign to identify states with lax gun laws and push for tighter restrictions to prevent the trafficking of guns used in crimes.

A study due to be released this week by a coalition called Mayors Against Illegal Guns uses previously unavailable federal gun data to identify what it says are the states that most often export guns used in crimes across state lines. It concludes that the 10 worst offenders per capita, led by Mississippi, West Virginia and Kentucky, supplied nearly half the 43,000 guns traced to crime scenes in other states last year.

The study also seeks to draw a link between gun trafficking and gun control laws by analyzing gun restrictions in all 50 states in areas like background checks for gun purchases, policies on concealed weapons permits and state inspections of gun dealers. It finds that, across the board, those states with less restrictive gun laws exported guns used in crimes at significantly higher rates than states with more stringent laws. An advance copy of the study was provided to The New York Times.

“There are 12,000 gun murders a year in our country, and this report makes it perfectly clear how common-sense trafficking laws can prevent many of them,” said Mr. Bloomberg, who is the co-chairman of the coalition with Mayor Thomas M. Menino of Boston. “For mayors around the country, this isn’t about gun control. It’s about crime control.”

The gun trafficking issue provides Mr. Bloomberg, often mentioned as a possible presidential candidate in 2012, with another national platform. He has been the face of the mayors’ coalition since it was created in 2006 in opposition to a Congressional amendment that restricted the sharing of federal gun data with the local police.

Since its inception, the group, which now includes 596 mayors nationwide, has expanded into other gun-related issues, including the exporting of guns from the United States to Mexican drug cartels.

The mayors plan to use the new trafficking data to push for more stringent gun restrictions at the state and federal levels. Among the targets, coalition officials said, will be closing the so-called gun show loophole. The loophole allows people to buy firearms at gun shows without going through the usual background checks that weed out felons and other banned buyers.

Gun control advocates have fought a losing battle against the loophole for more than a decade, but neither Congress nor the Obama administration has shown any inclination to revisit the issue, particularly since the Supreme Court and lower courts have issued a series of rulings affirming Second Amendment rights.

The mayors’ push to identify and crack down on states with high rates of gun trafficking is sure to face stiff opposition from gun rights advocates, who have been buoyed by the court rulings.

Chris W. Cox, the National Rifle Association’s chief lobbyist in Washington, dismissed the upcoming report as “a cute little P.R. stunt.” When told of the main findings, Mr. Cox said the report appeared to have relied on “flawed assumptions” about how guns flow across state lines and are traced back to their original purchasers.

“It’s completely bogus for a group with a clear political agenda to release some study based on selective statistics,” he said. “This is not a serious discussion. But this is what we’ve come to expect from Mayor Bloomberg and his gun control agenda.”

Authors of the study, however, said they had conducted a careful analysis of reams of gun “trace” data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — showing the path of guns confiscated at crime scenes — in reaching their conclusions. They said the study provided the deepest look to date at how states export guns used in crimes and how that relates to gun restrictions in those states.

James Alan Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University who was not involved in preparing the study, said the findings were likely to attract wide interest from academics and policymakers. Of particular significance, he said, will be the study’s data linking the laxity of gun laws in some states to the exporting of guns used in crimes in other states.

“What this does is help refute some of the statements that people make on the pro-gun side in saying that tougher gun laws are unconnected to reducing crime,” he said.

“A state’s gun laws are only as good as the weakest link in the national chain,” Professor Fox said. “A state with weaker gun laws becomes a supplier for states with stronger laws.”

Indeed, the authors of the mayors’ study, which was prepared largely out of Mr. Bloomberg’s office, said the findings suggested that gun traffickers had sought out states with less restrictive gun-purchase laws.

“What this really shows is that bad laws really do equal more gun trafficking,” said John Feinblatt, Mr. Bloomberg’s chief policy adviser, “and that gaps in the law really do make a difference.”

The study found that Mississippi, the state with the highest rate of crime-gun exports, supplied 50 out-of-state guns per 100,000 residents — more than three times the national average.

It also found that Mississippi, like all of the other states with the highest export rates, had relatively lax laws for bringing gun prosecutions, conducting background checks on buyers and preventing illegal purchases and transfers of guns. Officials at the Mississippi attorney general’s office declined to comment on the findings.

But Mr. Cox, of the N.R.A., said that the best way to prevent illegal trafficking was for the police and prosecutors to crack down on criminals, not to enact further restrictions that, he said, serve only to make it tougher for law-abiding citizens to purchase weapons. He predicted the new data from the mayors’ coalition would have no real impact on public policy.

“Do I think Mayor Bloomberg and his group are desperate for relevancy in a debate where they have no legitimate role? Sure,” Mr. Cox said. “Do I think their approach will continue to be rejected by the American people and Congress? I do.”

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